Without Warning Part 50

Caitlin visualized the small room on the other side of the door. A single bedroom, probably given to a child in happier days. A window overlooking the street behind. No connecting doors to any room on either side.

She examined the handle. An old-fashioned bra.s.s k.n.o.b without a keyhole.

There could be a latch on the other side, but of that she could not be certain.

There was only one thing for it.

Caitlin sheathed her fighting knife.

Powered down and raised her night-vision goggles.

And waited.

The mumbling and page turning continued.

She stood motionless for six minutes, until her opportunity arrived.

Another jet, roaring close overhead within a mile.

As the whining howl reached its maximum intensity she calmly reached out, opened the door, got a sight picture of one man, young and shirtless, sitting up in a small bed, leaning against a pillow, reading and looking up at her, all innocence and dawning bewilderment as the a.s.sa.s.sin raised a hand-tooled, frequency-shifting silenced pistol and squeezed the trigger twice.

Two muted clacks, almost like a stapler, and the subsonic .300 Whisper rounds left the muzzle of the weapon at about 980 feet per second, slowing only fractionally as they entered his brainpan and scattered the contents all over the room.

She swept the s.p.a.ce automatically, but already knew it to be empty.

A quick puff to blow out his candle and she pulled the door closed and turned down toward the next lighted room.

This one was silent. No muttering. No page turning. Again she waited.

Closer to the stairwell this time, she could hear at least three voices down on the ground floor. Two spoke in rapid-fire Arabic; one was slower, polished, but heavily accented.

Lacan.

Okay, that was a b.i.t.c.h. She'd been hoping to find him in bed, but filtering out his voice, she did determine that Baumer's German accent was not part of that conversation, the only one in the house at the moment.

Caitlin returned to her vigil at the door.

The flutter of a light leaking out told her of a candle inside.

She concentrated, leaning her ear to the door, and waiting. After three minutes she was rewarded with a brief snore.

No jet fighters conveniently appeared to cover the sounds of murder this time, but when the voices downstairs rose and broke into laughter she repeated her actions of a few minutes earlier. Coolly opening the door, lining up a headshot, and double-tapping her victim, a slightly overweight balding man who had fallen asleep with a pair of headphones plugged into an iPod. His body shuddered violently as the bullets shredded his neocortex.

Dousing this second candle, she plunged the floor back into darkness and refitted the NVGs.

Two other rooms remained on this level. According the building plans they were larger, possibly capable of taking more than one small bed.

Caitlin moved to the door through which she could hear the loudest snoring.

She sniffed the faintest trace of an earthy, familiar smell.

Kif.

A highly concentrated cannabis resin, popular among North African fighters.

That was enough for her to take a calculated risk, unshipping the fiberoptic set and sliding the wire under the door for a quick scan of the room.

Inside she found three men all asleep on the floor. There being no beds or other furniture, they had balled up clothes or bags and used them as pillows. Caitlin observed them until she was certain they were deeply asleep. She withdrew the surveillance device, and quietly swapped out her mag, which unfortunately only ran to six rounds. It was one of the drawbacks of using the bespoke no-name handgun.

This time, however, she kept the goggles powered up as she eased through the door and closed it behind her, covering the three p.r.o.ne forms all the time. A damp towel lay on the floor and she carefully toed it along the gap between the bottom of the door and the floorboards.

Then she quickly and methodically executed every man in the room.

Only the last one came awake, and then only enough to prop himself up on one elbow and squint into the dark. His sudden movement put her aim off and the first bullet struck him in the throat. Caitlin took two silent steps toward him and cut off his gargling death rattle with her last shot.

A hard, steel spike of pain was drilling into her head from a point about an inch behind her left eye, intensifying her nausea and giddiness.

She took a precious minute to center herself, to breathe deeply and detach from the barbed emotional tendrils of her b.l.o.o.d.y work.

The last of her six-shot magazines went into the pistol, and she replaced the suppressor with a new one taken from a slot on her belt. The silencers, unique to Echelon wet work cells, relied on a customized combination of austenitic nickel-based superalloy baffles, foam wipes, and carbon-nanotube mesh to reduce the sound of weapon fire by diverting and cooling the hot, rapidly expanding gases created by the detonation of the gunpowder. After she had burned out this one she would have to rely on her knife for silent killing.

She drifted to a halt in front of the next door, another darkened room outside which she waited for a minute before threading through the optical fiber again. When the display lit up this time ice water sluiced though her bowels. She could see Baumer, asleep on a mattress on the floor. Lying next to him was a woman she did not recognize. She had one leg draped over his thigh, and a thin arm lay across his chest.

Billy, Billy, Billy, she thought. Monique was too good for you, buddy.

She removed a one-use syringe from a leather pouch at her hip, uncapped the needle point, and pressed the plunger until a small stream of fluid squirted out.

Lacan was talking downstairs. In French now, cursing Sarkozy as a fascist and a half-Greek Jew, a comment that gave rise to an animated rant by one of his companions about the Jewish state and the revenge that was coming its way.

Seizing the opportunity, she entered the room, and came face-to-face with the woman, who had awoken and sat up. Her wide eyes searched the darkness, bulging when she saw Cailtin's outline: a silhouetted figure in black overalls, wearing night-vision gear and carrying a weapon. She was dead before she could scream, two bullets taking the top of her skull off and painting the wall behind them.

Baumer came awake instantly and rolled out from under the falling corpse, crying out as he did so. He launched himself at Cailtin's knees, knocking her back off her feet with a crash. She drove the syringe into his neck and squeezed, smashing the b.u.t.t of her pistol up against his head for good measure. It didn't knock him out, but it stunned him enough for her to piston a boot into his chest and push him away from her.

"Crusaders," he cried out in Arabic. "Hurry, they're here."

He tried to launch himself at her again, but the fast-acting drug had already robbed him of any coordination, and he fell like a drunk into a heap at her feet.

"Not so tough now, are you, you rapist motherf.u.c.ker," she said before hitting the PTT b.u.t.ton on her headset and crying out.

"I'm blown, Rolland! I got Baumer. Third floor, first room on the left coming up. Possible civilian above us, armed. Hostiles below. Lacan is awake and unsecured."

"You ..." said Baumer, mushily as he collapsed into a drugged stupor.

Caitlin heard the French commandos open fire on the ground floor.

The guard out there would be dropping to the ground, dead before he hit. Below her the sounds of riot and tumult erupted as men awoke and reached for their guns, unsure what was happening, but certain they were in mortal peril.

She holstered the silenced pistol and pulled her personal weapon around on its strap, an H&K MP-5. Feet thundered up the staircase below her and she darted from the room, all concern at stealth departed. The house had no power, but flashlights and electric lamps dazzled in her NVGs. She loosed two bursts from the submachine gun down the stairwell at the bobbing, moving sources of light. Two of them tumbled back down and the third stopped and dropped as the man carrying it let go.

Fire came back up at her, automatic and single shot, describing beautiful emerald traces in her enhanced night vision. She stripped a hand grenade from her belt while firing one-handed down the well, pulled the pin with her teeth, painfully cracking a filling as she did, and tossing the small bomb down into the maelstrom below. She closed her eyes, backing away and firing blindly. The grenade exploded with a roar that caused the spike of pain already drilling into her head to grow cruel thorns that raked at the back of her eyes and drove jagged spears deep into her brain stem.

Caitlin pitched over and vomited.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," she grunted, struggling to regain her feet.

The volume of fire downstairs was deafening, drowned out only by the deep ba.s.s percussion of exploding grenades on the ground floor. The boards beneath her shook and shuddered so much she feared they might collapse. And still she couldn't get up. Her head spun as though she'd stepped off a fairground ride, and she could not control her weapon anymore. Two figures appeared at the top of the stairs, one of them the squat, powerful outline of Dr. Noo.

He raised his weapon, a FAMAS a.s.sault rifle, at her and cried "Allahu Akbar!" just before his face exploded and he toppled backward onto the man behind him.

"Quick, come with me!"

The voice. Coming from above her. It was unfamiliar, but unmistakably American.

"Who the f.u.c.k ... ? "

She gagged and choked again on a mouthful of bile and toppled sideways as she tried to stand.

"Can't go," she protested. "My target."

"Leave him!"

The stranger, the man upstairs, leaped down beside her, stripped the MP-5 from her grip, and wrested a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He swapped out the mag in the dark without trouble and moved over to the stairs to fire down on any approaching attackers. Three more grenades exploded in close succession and the uproar of automatic fire became unbearable.

Caitlin felt herself falling away into darkness.

Seattle, Washington

No civilized man should ever be awake at this hour, thought Jed, as he waited in the darkened office for his last meeting of the night. Not unless he had a bottle of good champagne in one hand and couple of exotic dancers in the other.

He stayed away from the window, by habit now, but there wasn't that much to see.

The city center was in darkness save for a few buildings running on generators, one of them his own hotel, a few blocks away to the south. The never-ending caucus would still be in session there, as his delegates-he did think of them as his now-worked the phones and counted heads as they attempted to stave off defeat in the morning's vote.

But they would be defeated.

Jed Culver had stolen enough votes in his time to know when the situation was hopeless. The Putsch were going to get their amendments up. They were going to turn the United States government into something like a Third World junta. He shook his head at his own incompetence in not foreseeing this and aborting it at conception. But looking back, he could understand. He'd been so focused on his own, much humbler agenda that he simply had not been prepared for the depth of feeling, the visceral fear that had infected everything here in a way it hadn't back in Hawaii. That was understandable. You couldn't see the Wave in Hawaii. You didn't live every minute with the prospect of it moving and just eating you alive.

He should have factored that in.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men," he muttered to himself, "which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune-but omitted, and all the voyage of your life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

"What's that, Jed?"

Culver turned around and was surprised to find a thin man, silhouetted in the doorway by the light of a small handheld phone. Two larger men, instantly recognizable as bodyguards, loomed a discreet distance behind him.

"Just mangling the bard, Bill," he said. "It always helps me when creeping murmur and the poring dark, fills the wide vessel of the universe."

Bill shrugged.

"Me, I like to read or play bridge. Golf's pretty good, too. But not at this time of night."

"No," said Culver, who hadn't been expecting anyone like this. The others he'd met tonight had all been anonymous people. Quiet men and women.

"So ... ah ..."

The figure snickered in the gloom.

"I really threw you for a doozy, didn't I? Coming here, I mean."

Jed nodded.

"Yes, you did. I was expecting someone ... lower down the food chain."

"Someone expendable?"

"If you like."

The man walked into the room. His bodyguards remained in the corridor.

"This is important, Jed. I have a lot invested in this venture. We all do. If it fails we're sunk. If it plays out, who knows, maybe people will remember us hundreds of years from now. a.s.suming there's anybody left, of course."

Culver shrugged. "People would remember you anyway."

"Not for something as cool as this, Jed. This is the sort of thing that ends up in oil paintings. Like Paul Revere's ride. It's that important."

Culver couldn't argue with that.

"You did bring your phone, right?" asked Bill.

Jed pulled it out of his suit pocket and handed it over. The man's face was underlit by the glow of the screen as he keyed in a series of codes.

"Okay," he said, as the smart phone beeped. "The network is active."

"And secure?"

"And secure."

Jed thanked him as he took the phone back. He opened the message window and pressed a few b.u.t.tons. A single hard-encrypted message beamed out across the city to hundreds of identical devices.

"It's done," he said. "It's happening."